Month: August 2010

Sometime after 4:00 AM EST on August 25th, my Yahoo email account was compromised. Because of how that account was configured, the villain(s) were able to spam all of my friends and family – and basically anyone for whom I had an e-mail account. This despite an intention on my part to ‘firewall’ the account.

I pay for the Yahoo Plus mail account. Yea, I know given what many other mail providers are giving away that’s a waste of money but I have had the account forever and I hate to give it up. I use the account to register with all of the web-based services that require an e-mail account to authenticate that I’m a real live person. The account as no entries in its contact folder and has no mail in it. The account was set up to forward the e-mail to another account.

Contacts now works more like the rest of Gmail, so if you know how to use Gmail, now you should automatically feel comfortable in Contacts too

It’s all good stuff, but improving the look and feel of Contacts (as well as Gmail itself) has brought even more light to the disparity that exists between mail, contacts and the Task functionality Google provides. Keyboard shortcuts, configurable with tags on a full screen – both GMail and Contacts look really good. Tasks are still a little pop up with a beyond skinny interface and feature set. It looks really bad in comparison.

In fact it looks so bad, I don’t believe for a moment that anyone at Google is happy with the red headed step child that pops up in the lower right corner. When you consider the promise available with a tight integration with the other Google tools, the Task implementation is the biggest untapped opportunity they have.

I’ve said it before, I would love to have a tight GTD oriented task management tool built in to Google that would compare favorably with OmniFocus. They have everything in hand to produce a killer application. I’m guessing it already sits on a desktop somewhere waiting for the blessing to be rolled out to the public.